Shiver Trilogy (Shiver, Linger, Forever)
Page 6
I had to close my eyes again at the sound of his voice, because it shouldn’t have been familiar, but it was, speaking to me on some deep level just like his eyes always had as a wolf. It was turning out to be more difficult to accept this than I’d thought. I opened my eyes. He was still there. I tried again, closing and then opening them once more. But he was still there.
He laughed. “Are you having an epileptic fit? Maybe you should be in this bed.”
I glared at him, and he turned bright red as he realized another meaning for his words. I spared him from his mortification by answering his question. “What’s the favor?”
“I, uh, need some clothing. I need to get out of here before they figure out I’m a freak.”
“How do you mean? I didn’t see a tail.”
Sam reached up and began to pry at the edge of the dressings on his neck.
“Are you crazy?” I reached forward and grabbed at his hand, too late. He peeled away the gauze to reveal four new stitches dotting a short line through old scar tissue. There was no fresh wound still oozing blood, no evidence of the gunshot except for the pink, shiny scar. My jaw dropped.
Sam smiled, clearly pleased by my reaction. “See, don’t you think they’d suspect something?”
“But there was so much blood —”
“Yeah. My skin just couldn’t heal when it was bleeding so much. Once they stitched me up —” He shrugged and made a little gesture with his hands, like he was opening a small book. “Abracadabra. There are some perks to being me.” His words were light, but his expression was anxious, watching me, seeing how I was taking all this. How I was taking the fact of his existence.
“Okay, I just have to see something here,” I told him. “I just —” I stepped forward and touched the end of my fingers to the scar tissue on his neck. Somehow feeling the smooth, firm skin convinced me in a way that his words couldn’t. Sam’s eyes slid to my face and away again, unsure of where to look while I felt the lump of old scar beneath the prickling black sutures. I let my hand linger on his neck for slightly longer than necessary, not on the scar, but on the smooth, wolf-scented skin beside it. “Okay. So obviously you need to leave before they look at it. But if you sign out against medical advice or just take off, they’ll try to track you down.”
He made a face. “No, they won’t. They’ll just figure I’m some derelict without insurance. Which is true. Well, the insurance part.”
So much for being subtle. “No, they’ll think you left to avoid counseling. They think you shot yourself because of —”
Sam’s face was puzzled.
I pointed to his wrists.
“Oh, that. I didn’t do that.”
I frowned at him again. I didn’t want to say something like, “It’s okay, you have an excuse” or “You can tell me, I won’t judge,” because, really, that’d be just as bad as Sunny, assuming that he’d tried to kill himself. But it wasn’t as though he could’ve gotten those scars tripping on the stairs.
He rubbed a thumb over one of his wrists, thoughtful. “My mom did this one. Dad did the other one. I remember they counted backward so they’d do it at the same time. I still can’t stand to look at a bathtub.”
It took me a moment to process what he meant. I don’t know what did it — the flat, emotionless way he said it, the image of the scene that swam in my head, or just the shock of the evening in general, but I suddenly felt dizzy. My head whirled, my heartbeat crashed in my ears, and I hit the sticky linoleum floor hard.
I don’t know how many seconds I was out, but I saw the curtain slide open at the same time that Sam thumped back down on the bed, slapping the bandage back over his neck. Then a male nurse was kneeling beside me, helping me sit up.
“Are you okay?”
I’d fainted. I’d never fainted in my life. I closed my eyes and opened them again, until the nurse had one head instead of three heads floating side by side. Then I began to lie. “I just thought about all the blood when I found him … ohhhh …” I still felt woozy, so the ohhhh sounded very convincing.
“Don’t think about it,” suggested the nurse, smiling in a very friendly way. I thought his hand was slightly too close to my boob for casual contact, and that fact steeled my resolve to follow through with the humiliating plan that had just popped into my head.
“I think — I need to ask an embarrassing question,” I muttered, feeling my cheeks heat. This was almost as bad as if I was telling the truth. “Do you think I could borrow a pair of scrubs? I — uh — my pants —”
“Oh!” cried the poor nurse. His embarrassment at my condition was probably sharpened by his earlier flirtatious smile. “Yes. Absolutely. I’ll be right back.”
Good as his word, he returned in a few minutes, holding a folded pair of sick-green scrubs in his hands. “They might be a little big, but they have strings that you can — you know.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled. “Uh, do you mind? I’ll just change here. He’s not looking at anything at the moment.” I gestured toward Sam, who was looking convincingly sedated.
The nurse vanished behind the curtains. Sam’s eyes flashed open again, distinctly amused.
He whispered, “Did you tell that man you went potty on yourself?”
“You. Shut. Up,” I hissed back furiously and chucked the scrubs at his head. “Hurry up before they find out I didn’t wet myself. You seriously owe me.”
He grinned and slid the scrubs beneath the thin hospital sheet, wrestling them on, then tugged the dressing from his neck and the blood pressure cuff from his arm. As the cuff dropped to the bed, he ripped off his gown and replaced it with the scrubs top. The monitor squealed in protest, flatlining and announcing his death to the staff.
“Time to go,” he said, and led the way out behind the curtains. As he paused, quickly taking in the room around us, I heard nurses rustling into his curtained area behind us.
“He was sedated.” Sunny’s voice rose above the others.
Sam reached out and grabbed my hand, the most natural thing in the world, and pulled me into the bright light of the hall. Now that he was clothed — in scrubs, no less — and not drowning in blood, nobody blinked an eye as he wended his way past the nurses’ station and on toward the exit. All the while, I could see his wolf’s mind analyzing the situation. The tilt of his head told me what he was listening to, and the lift of his chin hinted of the scents he was gathering. Agile despite his lanky, loose-jointed build, he cut a deft path through the clutter until we were crossing the general lobby.
A syrupy country song was playing over the speaker system as my sneakers scrubbed across the ugly dark-blue tartan carpet; Sam’s bare feet made no sound. At this time of night, the lobby was empty, without even a receptionist at the desk. I felt so high on adrenaline I thought I could probably fly to Dad’s car. The eternally pragmatic corner of my mind reminded me that I needed to call the tow company to get my own car off the side of the road. But I couldn’t really work up proper annoyance about it, because all I could think about was Sam. My wolf was a cute guy and he was holding my hand. I could die happy.
Then I felt Sam’s hesitation. He held back, eyes fixed on the darkness that pressed against the glass door. “How cold is it out there?”
“Probably not too much colder than it was when I brought you. Why — will it make that much of a difference?”
Sam’s face darkened. “It’s right on the edge. I hate this time of year. I could be either.”
I heard the pain in his voice. “Does it hurt to change?”
He looked away from me. “I want to be human right now.”
I wanted him to be human, too. “I’ll go start the car and get the heater going. That way you’ll only be in the cold for a second.”
He looked a little helpless. “But I don’t know where to go.”
“Where do you normally live?” I was afraid he’d say something pitiful, like the homeless shelter downtown. I assumed he didn’t live with the parents who had cut his wrists.
I shook my head and let go of his hand. “No. I’m getting the car and you’re coming home with me.”
His eyes widened. “Your parents —?”
“What they don’t know won’t kill them,” I said, pushing open the door. Wincing at the blast of cold night air, Sam backed away from the door, wrapping his arms around himself. But even as he shuddered with the cold, he bit his lip and gave me a hesitant smile.
I turned toward the dark parking lot, feeling more alive and more happy and more afraid than I ever had before.
“Are you sleeping?” Sam’s voice was barely a whisper, but in the dark room where he didn’t belong, it was like a shout.
I rolled in my bed toward where he lay on the floor, a dark bundle curled in a nest of blankets and pillows. His presence, so strange and wonderful, seemed to fill the room and press against me. I didn’t think I’d ever sleep again. “No.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You already have.”
He paused, considering. “Can I ask you two questions, then?”
“You already have.”
Sam groaned and threw one of the small sofa pillows in my direction. It arced through the moonlit room, a blackened projectile, and thumped harmlessly by my head. “So you’re a smart-ass, then.”
I grinned in the darkness. “Okay, I’ll play. What do you want to know?”
“You were bitten.” But it wasn’t a question. I could hear the interest in his voice, sense the tension in his body, even across the room. I slid down into my blankets, hiding from what he’d said.
“I don’t know.”
Sam’s voice rose above a whisper. “How can you not know?”
I shrugged, though he couldn’t see it. “I was young.”
“I was young, too. I knew what was happening.” When I didn’t answer, he asked, “Is that why you just lay there? You didn’t know they were going to kill you?”
I stared at the dark square of night through the window, lost in the memory of Sam as a wolf. The pack circled around me, tongues and teeth, growls and jerks. One wolf stood back, ice-decked ruff bristling all along his neck, quivering as he watched me in the snow. Lying in the cold, under a white sky going dark, I kept my eyes on him. He was beautiful: wild and dark, yellow eyes filled with a complexity I couldn’t begin to fathom. And he gave off a scent the same as the other wolves around me — rich, feral, musky. Even now, as he lay in my room, I could smell the wolf on him, though he was wearing scrubs and a new skin.
Outside, I heard a low, keening howl, and then another. The night chorus rose, missing Sam’s plaintive voice but gorgeous nonetheless. My heart quickened, sick with abstract longing, and on the floor, I heard Sam give a low whimper. The miserable sound, caught halfway between human and wolf, distracted me.
“Do you miss them?” I whispered.
Sam climbed from his makeshift bed and stood by the window, an unfamiliar silhouette against the night, his arms clutched around his lanky body. “No. Yeah. I don’t know. It makes me feel — sick. Like I don’t belong here.”
Sounds familiar. I tried to think of something to say to comfort him, but couldn’t settle on anything that would sound genuine.
“But this is me,” he insisted, his chin jerking to refer to his body. I didn’t know if he meant to convince me or himself. He remained by the window as the wolves’ howls reached a crescendo, pricking my eyes to tears.
“Come up here and talk to me,” I said, to distract both of us. Sam half turned, but I couldn’t see his expression. “It’s cold down there on the floor and you’ll get a crick in your neck. Just come up here.”
“What about your parents?” he said, the same question he’d asked in the hospital. I was about to ask him why he worried about them so much, when I remembered Sam’s story about his own parents and the shiny, puckered scars on his wrists.
“You don’t know my parents.”
“Where are they?” Sam asked.
“Gallery opening, I think. My mom’s an artist.”
His voice was dubious. “It’s three o’clock in the morning.”
My voice was louder than I’d meant for it to be. “Just get in. I trust you to behave. And to not hog the sheets.” When he still hesitated, I said, “Hurry up, before there’s no more night left.”
Obediently, he retrieved one of the pillows from the floor, but hesitated again on the opposite side of the bed. In the dim light, I could just make out his mournful expression as he regarded the forbidden territory of the bed. I wasn’t sure if I was charmed by his reluctance to share a bed with a girl or insulted that, apparently, I wasn’t hot enough for him to charge the mattress like a bull.
Finally, he climbed in. The bed creaked under his weight, and he winced before settling on the very far edge of it, not even under the blanket. I could smell the faint wolf scent better now, and I sighed with a strange contentedness. He sighed, too.
“Thank you,” he said. Formal, considering he was lying in my bed.
“You’re welcome.”
The truth of it struck me then. Here I was with a shape-shifting boy in my bed. Not just any shape-shifting boy, but my wolf. I kept reliving the memory of the deck light clicking to life, revealing him for the first time. A weird combination of excitement and nervousness tingled through me.
Sam turned his head to look at me, as though my thrill of nerves had sent up a flare. I could see his eyes glinting in the dim light, a few feet away. “They bit you. You should’ve changed, too, you know.”
In my head, the wolves circled a body in the snow, their lips bloody, teeth bared, growling over the kill. A wolf, Sam, dragged the body from the circle of wolves. He carried it through the trees on two legs that left human footprints in the snow. I knew I was falling asleep, so I shook myself awake; I couldn’t remember whether I’d answered Sam.
“Sometimes I wish I had,” I told him.
He closed his eyes, miles away on the other side of the bed. “Sometimes I do, too.”
I woke up all in a rush. For a moment, I lay still, blinking, trying to determine what had woken me. The events of the previous night rushed back to me as I realized it wasn’t a sound that had woken me, but a sensation: a hand resting on my arm. Grace had rolled over in her sleep, and I couldn’t stop staring at her fingers resting on my skin.
Here, lying next to the girl who had rescued me, my simple humanity felt like a triumph.
I rolled onto my side and for a while, I just watched her sleep, long, even breaths that moved the flyaway hairs by her face. In slumber, she seemed utterly certain of her safety, utterly unconcerned by my presence beside her. That felt like a subtle victory, too.
When I heard her father get up, I lay perfectly still, heart beating fast and silent, ready to leap from the edge of the mattress in case he came to wake her for school. But he left for work in a cloud of juniper-scented aftershave that billowed toward me from under the door. Her mother left soon after, noisily dropping something in the kitchen and swearing in a pleasant voice as she shut the door behind her. I couldn’t believe they wouldn’t glance into Grace’s room to make sure she was still alive, especially considering they hadn’t seen her when they came home in the dead of the night. But the door stayed shut.
Anyway, I felt foolish in the scrubs, and they were useless to me in this awful in-between weather, so I slipped out while Grace slept; she didn’t even stir as I left. I hesitated on the back deck, looking at the frost-tipped blades of grass. Even though I’d borrowed a pair of her father’s boots, the early morning air still bit at the skin of my bare ankles beneath the rubber. I could almost feel the nausea of the change rolling over in my stomach.
Sam, I told myself, willing my body to believe. You’re Sam. I needed to be warmer; I retreated inside to find a coat. Damn this weather. What had happened to summer? In an ove
rstuffed closet that smelled of stale memories and mothballs, I found a puffy, bright blue jacket that made me look like a blimp and ventured out into the backyard with more confidence. Grace’s father had feet the size of a yeti, so I tramped into the woods with all the grace of a polar bear in a dollhouse.
Despite the chilly air that made ghosts of my breath, the woods were beautiful this time of year, all bold primary colors: crisp leaves in startling yellow and red, bright cerulean sky. Details I never noticed as a wolf. But as I made my way toward my stash of clothing, I missed all the things I didn’t notice as a human. Though I still had heightened senses, I couldn’t smell the many subtle tracks of animals in the underbrush or the damp promise of warmer weather later in the day. Normally, I could hear the industrial symphony of cars and trucks on the distant highway and detect the size and speed of each vehicle. But now all I could smell was the smokiness of autumn, its burning leaves and half-dead trees, and all I could hear was the low, barely audible hum of traffic far in the distance.
As a wolf, I would have smelled Shelby’s approach long before she’d come into sight. But not now. She was nearly on top of me when I got the feeling that something was close. The tiny hairs on my neck stood at attention, and I had the uneasy sense that I was sharing my breath with someone else. I turned and saw her, big for a female, white coat ordinary and yellowish in this full daylight. She seemed to have survived the hunt without so much as a scratch. Ears slightly back, she observed my ridiculous apparel with a cocked head.
“Shhh,” I said, and held my hand out, palm up, letting what was left of my scent waft toward her. “It’s me.”
Her muzzle curled in distaste as she backed slowly away, and I guessed she recognized Grace’s scent layered on top of mine. I knew I did; even now, her spare, soapy aroma clung to my hair where I’d lain on her bed and to my hand where she’d held it.
Wariness flashed in Shelby’s eyes, mirroring her human expression. This was how it was with Shelby and me — I couldn’t remember a time we hadn’t been subtly at odds. I clung to my humanity — and to my obsession with Grace — like a drowning man, but Shelby welcomed the forgetting that came with her lupine skin. Of course, she had plenty of reasons to forget.